Let's not hoard

There was a news article on Friday implying that there will be stricter controls in our movement control order, and there we go, panic buying happens again.

I tried to go to the supermarket yesterday morning but cars were lining up to enter. I gave up and turned back. 

I only need milk, fruits and bread. But I didn't want to be in the crowd. 

This morning, my hubby went out to 7-11 and managed to get some milk and bread. 

Good enough. It will last us for another week.

Stay safe everyone. We don't have to eat a lot or even eat all the time. Be ok with what we already have. 

pearlie

Don't be a Small Breath Ghost 小氣鬼

The Chinese language is truly a very pictorial language.

The word of the day for me is 小氣, siu2hei3 in Cantonese and xiao3qi4 in Mandarin.

Literally 小 means small and 氣 means gas, air, breath or anger. And 小氣 means narrow-minded. 

Sigh...it's just someone being very 小氣 today which was so frustrating. 

It makes me wonder why people do not look at the bigger picture but fret over the smallest of things.

pearlie

Take a long look at the mirror before we even begin

I was reminded today of the Bible verse about the speck and log in the eye and found it here in this passage. 

Matthew 7:1-5 ESV

Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you. Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye.

It is a very timely lesson that when we want to complain and judge others, first take a look at ourselves. And by the time we notice our log and try to remove, the speck on the other person eye doesn't seem so bad anymore. And by the time we judge our own actions and behaviour, we know we stand guilty and sinful before our God.

I like NT Wright on this passage in his Matthew for Everyone, where he said:

God intends that his world should be ordered, and that injustice should be held in check. Jesus is referring, not to official lawcourts, but to the judgments and condemnations that occur within ordinary lives, as people set themselves up as moral guardians and critics of one another...

He doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have high standards of behaviour for ourselves and our world, but that the temptation to look down on each other for moral failures is itself a temptation to play God. And, since we aren’t God, that means it’s a temptation to play a part, to act, to be a ‘hypocrite’ (which literally means a playactor, one who wears a mask as a disguise)...

Jesus, we should note, doesn’t rule out the possibility that some people will eventually be able to help others to take specks of dust out of their eyes. He isn’t saying that there is no such thing as public morality. But he is warning that the very people who seem most eager to tell others what to do (or more likely what not to do) are the people who should take a long look in the mirror before they begin.

I know that I need to stand in front of the mirror more and longer.

pearlie

Projects for the new year!

I have said before that I have stopped making new year resolutions because I will never keep them, and that I will have projects instead.

I know. I know. Call a spade a spade. But humour me. I will have my projects for the year. 

I started it back in 2016, continued it in 2017 and 2018. Missed 2019 and so now it's 2020.

Looking back at Project 2016:

1. Cooking - never lasted even a few months.

2. Knitting - haha...what was I even thinking, I gave up before I even started though I did purchase all the materials.

3. SketchNotes - been-there-done-that kinda deal but it was fun though.

And for Project 2017:

1. Reading - met my book challenge of 20 books in the year.

2. Join a technical choral group - I auditioned for one, got through but after one session, it wasn't what I had expected.

3. Learn a new language - started learning Korean and also to improve my Mandarin.

And as for Project 2018:

1. Reading - I did better completing 33 books out of my 25-book challenge.

2. Language - very disciplined with my Korean though I slacked on my Mandarin.
3. Lose weight - met my weight goal, woohoo! and was able to even go slightly beyond that.

I didn't make any list for Project 2019 but perhaps I do have the same ones:
1. Reading - for the first time since I started my annual book challenge in 2012, this is the year that I failed. I only read 9 books.
2. Language - good going but my strategy wasn't working as well as I expected. 
3. Maintain my weight - success!

And now Project 2020. When I looked at year 2019, I realised that I had wasted a lot of time on a lot of useless stuff. And with that, I have decided to reclaim my time that is to be wasted if I don't change. So my projects for 2020 will be these:
1. Reading - a 30-book challenge. I've just finished one book. Slowing down a bit right now since I'm catching up on my travelogue. Looking forward to getting back into the roll.

2. Writing - get back to blogging again and put my many thoughts into words, and hope it blesses others.

3. New Testament in One Year - I signed up for a communal reading of the NT with friends at church.

4. Exercise - I usually just have 3 but I'm adding one more. I hope to get this much needed thing going. 

Crossing my fingers!

pearlie

We all procrastinate, don't we?

I have posted this video back in 2016 but I still talk about it and recommend it to others when the topic comes up. 

Are we born procrastinators?

I don't want to be one but I find myself procrastinating all the time. It's a refusal to just get to work and complete the stuff that I need to do. 

Why do we procrastinate?

Someone says it's a craving to do something else because we have an aversion to the very thing that we are to do. 

Is that so?

But there are things that I love doing that I procrastinate a lot on. Like writing. I love to put my thoughts into this blog but I keep procrastinating on it. But when I get started, I really enjoy doing it. 

So why do I procrastinate?

I suppose like what Tim Urban in the video says, the Self-Gratification Monkey prefers to play and do other more fun and useless stuff leaving the Rational Decision Maker with no handle on the situation but wait till the monkey gives up so he can get to work. 

I need to keep the monkey on reins and at bay.

I need to be rational and stop procrastinating especially when there are no deadlines. 

pearlie

I don't read the news

Yes, you heard me right. I don't read the news. I always forget to. 

And I would feel guilty and left out and stupid when people talk about the big headlines. 

Until I read Chapter 99 of The Art of Thinking Clearly. Anyway, this will be the final post on that book, for now. But it will still be a book I will refer to every now and then. It is indeed very useful to train myself into thinking more clearly. 

Ok back to Chapter 99, on the News Illusion. 

Dobelli says, "We are incredibly well informed, yet we know incredibly little. Why? Because two centuries ago, we invented a toxic form of knowledge called 'news'. News is to the mind what sugar is to the body: appetizing, easy to digest—and highly destructive in the long run."

Really? 

But isn't news suppose to keep us in the loop, inform us about current issues and what matters?

I am still not sure about this.

But Dobelli brings out three points:

1. Our brains react disproportionately to different types of information. It is attracted to the sensational, shocking and scandalous. It filters out the subtle, complex, abstract, and profound. Think about it, would we rather read The Star or The Edge?

2. News is irrelevant. It is difficult to remember what we read and much of the time we can still get by not knowing. 

3. And as a result, news is a waste of time. He took the example of the 2008 Mumbai terror attack. He said, "Out of sheer thirst for recognition, terrorists murdered two hundred people. Let’s say a billion people devoted an hour of their time to following the aftermath: They viewed the minute-by-minute updates and listened to the inane chatter of a few “experts” and “commentators.” This is a very realistic “guesstimate” since India has more than a billion inhabitants. Thus our conservative calculation: One billion people multiplied by an hour’s distraction equals one billion hours of work stoppage. If we convert this, we learn that news consumption wasted around two thousand lives—ten times more than the attack. A sarcastic but accurate observation."

I still want to be in the know, but I won't worry too much now about missing out on current issues. I will still do what I do now—scanning headlines in Google News. I only read a couple that I find interesting. 

And the rest I will go read up when I hear people around me talking about it. 

What do you think?

pearlie

Beware! Our sense of alertness isn't as good we think it is

Before you read on, watch the video. You may have seen it before but watch it still and you might be surprised. 

I was reading the chapter on the Illusion of Attention in Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly and I am being warned. 

I admit that when I drive, I'm always distracted. I am always listening to music, looking at my phone and all. 

When all things are running as clockwork, where all vehicles are doing what they are expected to do, all will be fine.

But when something unexpected happens, and they do, I will not be able to react in time. 

There are no buts. Consider myself warned. 

pearlie

How much do you read, if at all?

I was having a meeting with my boss today to discuss about the learning culture in an organization and the discussion went into the subject of reading.

I posted about the dismal statistics on reading in Malaysia back in year 2016, and upon checking out more recent research, it has not gone any better. 

And this article even say we rank eighth from bottom global literacy list. 

We buy books, but we don't seem to be reading them. 

This 2017 report from WorldAtlas does not even have us in the list when the top 4 countries that read the most are in Asia: India (10.42 hours per week!), Thailand (9.24), China (8.00) and Philippines (7.36).

10.42 hours a week is about 1 hour and a half a day, which in fact is quite doable. 

So let's max it out and assume we take on average 5 hours to read a book and that would be 2 books in a week, about 100 books in a year.

Ok, maybe that is too ambitious for us. 

What if we do a book a month? And that would come up (or down) to 1.25 hours a week. 

Nope, we still won't make it to the list.

And everyone says reading is a good thing, but nobody here seem to believe in it. 

pearlie

Why do you eat what you eat?

Sadly, this cartoon from theAwkwardYeti.com pretty much sums up my eating behaviour lately. 

We were taught and told that we eat to live, that we need to eat to get the energy to pursue our daily living. 

That's logical, but that does not seem to tell the whole story, does it?

So I went googling for some insights and found this book.

Hedonic Eating, How the Pleasure of Food Affects Our Brains and Behavior

by Nicole M. Avena, ed.

It was published in 2015 where the author editor compiled and reviewed literature from various writers on the topic of hedonic eating. 

Hedonic eating? 

She says that hedonic eating is a relatively new term derived from the concept of  hedonism, which by definition is the doctrine that pleasure or happiness is the sole or chief good in life. Hedonic eating is a form of eating in which one eats for pleasure rather than for energy needs. The desire to eat solely to reproduce the pleasurable feelings associated with particular foods activates the reward circuits of the brain. 

With that I can confirm that I am a Hedonic Eater. 

pearlie

No choice but to ride the storm out

No one has made me angry and no one has betrayed me for quite awhile now.

Until very recently.

I made the effort to spend some time with that someone but what I got was blame and judgment and very unkind words.

I got quite mad but I was in no position to even defend myself.

So I just kept quiet willing the minutes to go faster till I can extricate myself from the situation.

A few days have passed now but I find that I still get affected by it. The emotion is still quite raw.

But I have already come to an acceptance that my emotions will come no matter what I do. I can't avoid them. So as always, I will ride them out till they subside.

But it's taking much longer to do that this time.

And it's also a decision I make. When I begin to get affected by it, I stop myself and decide not to be. I decide to stop dwelling in it. I decide to forgive.

Though it's not easy. Not at all.

pearlie

What to do when you get scolded for no reason

I sort of got scolded by someone for no reason today and I got quite frustrated with it. 

But I did these few things:

- I did react at first but stepped back after that to try understand it all

- I began to admit to myself that I am not very good in that area to begin with

- I evaluated the situation and realised (again) that I am looking at the wrong places for fulfilment

I then found this article How to Survive Being Scolded useful and I did do some of the steps suggested, but a few more I’d need to pick up and think about it more. 

pearlie

Be brave enough to live life creatively

Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort. 

~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others. 

~ Ayn Rand

Be brave enough to live life creatively. The creative place where no one else has ever been. 

~ Alan Alda

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things. 

~ Steve Jobs

pearlie

Why do we lou sang when it’s not even the Chinese New Year yet?

I remember we used to only lou sang during the Chinese New Year proper, which is only right because we lou sang to the New Year and not the old. 

So why do we do it now before the New Year?

What I can deduce is that the restaurants want to make more bucks with it since there is a high demand and I believe their profit margin is very lucrative. And for us consumers, we have more opportunities to eat it. 

We just had it for dinner today and it was really good. 

pearlie

Driving on the other side of the road

Now that I’m back to driving on the usual side of the car and road, I couldn’t help but compare it to when I was driving in the US. 

I rented and driven two cars for a total of 3 days. 

Th first car was the huge 5.3L V8 engine Chevrolet Suburban and the second was the 1.6L Hyundai Accent and I must say that I prefer the larger one. It felt safer and no one honked me at all when I drove it! I certainly got honked at a lot when I was in the Hyundai. 

And I think I would have driven about 500km going around Monterey, Seaside, Marina, Watsonville and all the way up to San Francisco and back. 

I noticed these few differences when I was driving in the US. 

For one, it was definitely a matter of conscious competence and unconscious competence. I notice now that when I drive here in KL, I don’t think about it at all but I couldn’t not think when in the US. I was in full alert. It’s a don’t-talk-to-me-when-I’m-driving thing. 

Two, I keep having to vocally tell myself to turn into the right side of the road or I will head into the left. I and do at that every turn, “turn into right, not left.”

Thirdly, I need to look out for cars coming from the left, not right when I’m making a turn. I was not so conscious of this and I nearly got myself into a major accident. It was dark and the roads were empty. I wanted to turn left, but I looked instead to the right for cars. I started off and suddenly there was a car coming very fast from the left. Thankfully, I stopped in time. The car gave me a long loud honk as he passed by. And I went, phew! that was a close one. 

Fourthly, I notice that my brain took on a mirror image to what’s left and what’s right, so much so that when Google Map or Waze tell me to keep left, I’d keep right and conversely when it tells me to keep right, I’d think it’s left. Thankfully I have my son there to correct me. 

Fifthly, my car unintentionally kept moving to the right. So I prefer to keep to the right lane so that I have some space and I don’t keep swerving into other people’s lane. But I kept in the middle lane when I was driving back from San Francisco and I keep having to adjust to keep the car to the left. I got honked once when my car got too much to the right. Also, when I’m stationary and when I want to turn out from the left to the right, my son keep telling me I that nearly hit the cars on my right. Thank God I didn’t. 

And finally, when I was driving back from San Francisco in the night, my mind keep going into the emergency mode when I see car lights all coming from the right side of the road. Hence, the two-hour journey back was the most stressful one. 

My blood pressure would have been on the high side because of driving in the US. But it was certainly an adventure and an experience but I’d stick to the left road and right side of the car for now. 

Oh, one more thing to add is the funnniest and most embarrassing one: I’d walk to the wrong side of the car. 

And I did that twice so far. 

Once when the driver came to pick us up from the airport in Taipei, I walked over to the driver side and opened the door. I did the exact same thing when the Lyft (Uber alternative in the US) came to pick me up from the Monterey airport. 

It was so, so embarrassing!

pearlie

Do you know how you use your time everyday?

In my current interest in the topic of health and lifestyle, I found a very interesting app called Life Cycle. 

I have uploaded it before but to begin using it, it needs to run for 48 hours. 

I remember when I first did that some time ago, nothing happened after waiting for 48 hours. And so I deleted it in disappointment not realising I should have just wait it out a bit more. 

I tried it again. This time I let it run for 48 hours and then I left it be and soon it started kicking in and now that I see what it does, I really like it. 

The app tracks my time automatically and at the end of everyday, I will be able to see how I have spent my entire day. 

For a person who loves big picture and who almost always think about the purpose of life, this helps fills my curiosity and brings me some sort of a simple understanding and order to my life. 

pearlie

I do actually walk more than I thought I would

My hubby got himself a FitBit recently and he is quite obsessed about accomplishing his desired number of steps every day, and he was quite infectious. 

But I did not do anything about it until very recently when I was introduced the BookDoc app that gamifies it all - apparently if you can achieve a minimum average of 3000 steps a day, you can retrieve rewards through the app. 

It was only then when I activated my step counter in my iPhone. 

The BookDoc people told us that the norm in Malaysia is only at 2500 steps per day. And I half-jokingly told my colleague that I will be terrible at it, that I will probably only walk 200 steps a day!

However, I was quite surprised that I actually did manage an average of 3000+ steps over the past few days. And what’s amazing for a person who hates to walk is that I am better than the Malaysian norm. 

The trick now is to walk like what I have been doing for the past few days.

This is a good motivation for me - not so much the rewards, but the fact that I can and do actually walk more than the norm, more than I thought I would. 

pearlie

Useless words that I use all the time

I gave a short brief at work about business writing and one thing I did highlight was the need to do away with useless business jargons and buzz words. 

And I obviously need to practice that myself as I notice that I use the word “basically” a lot.

I know that whenever I wanted to explain something or whenever I’m in a discussion, I will say that word all the time, every time. 

I don’t know when I got infected by it but I find that it’s a favourite of many. You hear it wherever you go and with most people whom you speak to. 

And I can’t seem to stop it from coming out of my mouth. 

When I am speaking and as I think to speak, I’d soon say “basi-”... and I would have no choice but to complete the word and get on with my speech, though my thoughts will be interrupted with some self-chiding going on. 

The trick now is to stop my brain from producing that now dreaded and useless word. 

But how? The brain thinks what it wants to think. 

pearlie

Why incompetent people think they are amazing?

I was having a team meeting when my colleague said it is frustrating engaging with people who do not realize how incompetent they are. And this reminded me of an article I just read a couple of days ago: Why Incompetent People Think They Are Amazing?

This 5-minute video explains why some of us overestimate our capabilities and some even underestimate it. How is it that when we’re unskilled, we can’t see our own faults, and when we’re exceptionally competent, we don’t perceive how unusual our abilities are?

My takeaway from this is to ask for feedback even if it is hard to hear, and there is just this one thing which has been bugging my mind for the last couple of weeks. I need to gather up the courage to ask for feedback already. 

pearlie

TV in bed

I just found out that there are these beds upholstered with a television at the footboard, and I am here trying to stop myself from watching too much TV. 

I am fasting from TV for one month. Will I last?

pearlie

What time do you sleep every night?

I left my iPad in the office and with no entertainment, I went to sleep at 9:30! That is rare for one who usually sleeps at 12am. 

pearlie